The German Genius

He is much admired by modern architects such as Philip Johnson, James Stirling, and I. M. Pei.
    The son, grandson, and great-grandson of Lutheran pastors, Schinkel was born in 1781 in Neuruppin, a town famous for its Gymnasium, about twenty miles northwest of Berlin. When he was six, his father was killed in a fire that laid waste most of his hometown, and in 1794 his widowed mother took the rest of the family to Berlin. An exhibition of drawings by the young Friedrich Gilly so fascinated Schinkel that, at the age of sixteen, he decided to be an architect. He began his studies with David Gilly, Friedrich’s father, in March 1798, while the younger Gilly was abroad. When Friedrich returned, they formed a close friendship so that, by 1799, Schinkel was living in the Gilly household. That was the year when a separate Bauakademie was officially opened on the first floor of Henrich Gentz’s new Berlin Mint, Schinkel becoming one of ninety-five students. Carl Gotthard Langhans was on the teaching staff. 23
    Berlin in 1794, when Schinkel arrived there, had a population of 156,000, compared with 332,000 at his death in 1841. It was built on marshy ground and crisscrossed with dikes, canals, and ramshackle wooden bridges, hardly a sophisticated capital of a rising state. There were, however, a few monumental buildings: the old Stadtschloss on an island in the river Spree, had been renovated by Berlin’s first great architect, Andreas Schlüter (1659–1714). North of that was the Lustgarten, or pleasure garden, dominated by Johann Boumann’s Lutheran cathedral (1747–50). There was a library and a Palladian opera house but little more because Friedrich the Great had preferred Potsdam. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the two most prominent of the very few modern buildings in Berlin were the Brandenburg Gate and the new Mint. 24
    Because of the uncertainties produced by the Napoleonic Wars, Schinkel spent the early years of his career as a stage designer and painter of romantic landscapes. But a panorama Schinkel produced in 1809 caught the attention of someone close to the royal family, and on the strength of that he was commissioned to redecorate the bedroom of Queen Luise at Charlottenburg Palace. When the queen died later that year, he submitted plans for a mausoleum. That commission eventually went to Gentz, but Schinkel had more luck with Berlin’s most important war memorial, a Gothic cross he designed for the Tempelhofer Berg (subsequently known as the Kreuzberg). Cast iron was used for this war memorial, one of the first times the material was employed. Iron was on everyone’s mind just then because, at the beginning of the War of Liberation in 1813, Schinkel had collaborated with Friedrich Wilhelm III on the design of the Iron Cross, which would become Prussia’s most honorific military medal. In this case iron was used not so much because it reflected developing industry (Berlin had excellent foundries), but as a substitute for precious metals and symbolic of a sacrifice made for the fatherland. The crown had appealed to wealthy families to contribute jewelry to help pay for the wars, and they were given receipts in the form of iron jewelry. This often bore a small cross with the head of the king and inscriptions such as “Gold gab ich für Eisen 1813” (I gave gold for iron). Between 1813 and 1815 it is estimated that over 11,000 pieces of iron jewelry were produced, including 5,000 iron crosses. 25
    By the time the Kreuzberg monument was executed (1821), the Napoleonic Wars were long gone, and prosperity was returning to Prussia. Schinkel became fully engaged in a range of improvements in and around Berlin and was given ever greater administrative responsibility for architectural projects. 26
    Though he turned into one of the finest neoclassical architects—if not the finest—Schinkel was not interested only in Greek antiquity, and when he first visited Italy, in 1803–05, he paid just as much attention to Italian medieval buildings. 27 His genius was deep enough that he could express himself in a number of styles. His commissions included the Neue Wache of the Palace Guard (1816), the Schauspielhaus or Royal Theater (1819–21, the previous one having burned down), and the Altes Museum (1824–28). In each of these masterpieces, Schinkel was so at ease with classicism that he was able to use its principles to lay the foundations of a new style. For example, behind the Ionic colonnade of